Unicef’s website has an encouraging story about some of the efforts to educate young girls in Afghanistan. The girls often have to fight against those around them who do not think they should be educated but they are prepared to quote the Koran to underline their right to education. The Bangladeshi organisation BRAC runs some of the schools. Their use of videos as educationa tools underlines the importance that broadcast material can have...

The involvement of radio and TV broadcasters from throughout the world, the range of factual topics covered and the quality of the finalists are highlighted in this video of last year’s international media excellence awards, the 2009 AIBs There is still time to enter the 2010 AIBs – for full details go to the entries page on the website. You can also see other videos from the Association for International Broadcasting on our YouTube...

Two interesting studies have recently been released showing US and UK public perceptions of climate change after the recent “climategate” email leaks from the University of East Anglia (UEA) and controversies over mistakes in the 4th IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) report. In the US, the Woods Institute for the Environment have carried out their 5th annual survey. 74% of respondents in a 100o person telephone...

The Hartwell paper was published this week by a group of 14 academics from USA, Canada, UK, Germany, Finland and Japan. It proposes that the failure of the UN Copenhagen summit (COP15) to enforce meaningful targets and the lack of noticeable progress from the global agreements and targets on reducing carbon emissions actually provide an opportunity to address concerns on climate change in different ways. The authors argue for the expansion of...

The new People’s Choice award in this year’s AIBs is very exciting for a number of reasons. It is the first time we are asking the general public to vote for awards, which allows the shortlisted entrants to gain a wider exposure for their programmes, as viewers will come from throughout the world, including many countries where the programmes are not currently broadcast. The voting process will also use social media to gain...

Twitter, the service for online messages that are limited to 140 characters, has not had a clear plan for gaining revenue up until now, despite attracting tens of millions of users who post 50 million messages every day. But yesterday the company announced “Promoted Tweets”, which are basically adverts. Initially they will be on search results, so that the first result displayed for each search may be an advert. Adverts will start out as normal...